CUPdate 37: Recap and Plans for the Year

I've been making a lot of blog posts recently, so I wanted this to be a shorter post to summarize those posts for my CUPdate presentation. I'm also going to talk about the projects and everything I've been working on since the last CUPdate!

To start off, here's the summary of my project-based goals for 2022 and how those went:

• Draw Every Day: For the first few months, I did actually draw every day. Once my health issues started to spiral downward in June, I stopped being as consistent, but I did still post a digital sketchbook page every month besides December.
• Compass Nays: I didn't finish the prologue. This one should probably be put on hold. I DID finish a full game called Spirits of Combination Village though, so I'd say that can count in its place!
• Eventure Twine: I finished at least 1 Eventure Twine. I also started on a second one and got a headstart on a lot of storyboards for various Eventures that I read or rewrote. I also organized all of them into Google Docs and read through a lot/did a lot of proofreading, so I made really good progress on this.
• Monthly Nay Days: I set these up with my brother and we met pretty much every month for the most part! They were really helpful and we're going to try and do more.
• Talk more about The Nays: I created the Nay A Week vlog! I also talked more about what happens in the actual Eventures in my CUPdate presentations in December.

And then here are my goals for 2023:

• Draw daily, or as often as possible, and post those digital sketchbook pages online once a month.
• Meet with my brother bi-weekly for Nay Days.
• Create 2 Eventure Twines for The Nays. Also continue to focus on The Nays with proofreading, storyboards, and rewrites.
• Record a new vlog series called Eventure A Week. Talk about each Eventure in less than 30 seconds each, spoiler-free.

Since the last CUPdate, I finished the Cimc Eventure Twine! Check out the post here to learn more about that and read through the Eventure. I made a landing page website here and posted the Twine on itchio here.

For Christmas, I got Colors Live on Nintendo Switch, so I'm excited to have a way to create digital art portably now! I've been doing some of the daily challenges that they have and they have some fun limitations to help me get used to using the platform. You can view my profile here.

 

I also met with my brother over the break and we finished writing The Nays Eventure, which is the 3rd Eventure and the next one for me to create a Twine out of. So now I can progress forward on that. We also talked about some plans for the next ones that are earlier in the story, so we might start working on those ones during our next Nay Days. I also read the Stinky Girl Eventure, which is one that I wrote back in April, so he got to hear that part of the story finally.

I also finished my Nay A Week vlog series. I recorded a video (roughly) each week throughout 2022 and talked about The Nays generally. It ranges from general story explanations to what projects I was working on, or just random thoughts or tidbits that I had about what was going on in The Nays.

And then as a tradition, my first drawing of 2023 is related to Cipo. I drew a scene from the Project CBF Eventure that I wrote last year. This is when The Nays let Milada free in the lab and she sees Ciporsius after learning about his time travel plans relating to her.

I also made a Notion page where I'm going to plan out and track what projects my brother and I do during our bi-weekly voice chats! And I have a database of options for us to do so we know what's upcoming as well.

So that's it for this post! I got a lot of end of the year stuff done and also started to draw more. This is probably because I had some time off from work so had more time to dedicate to projects, but I hope I can keep some of this up in the weeks to come, too!

Improvement Movement 2019

Along with my yearly recap of art in general, I revisited an old project this year called the Improvement Movement!

It was hard to keep up with it in addition to doing daily projects and things, so some of my last ones were done late, but it was a fun way to keep on working on projects that helped with world-building throughout the year.

Here's a recap of what I did each month:

This was a project I did with a few of my friends, and was meant as a way to keep us all drawing, and kind of simulate the feeling of drawing together. We did the same projects and would post them in a channel on Discord.

It was a fun project, but with everyone having busy lives and other projects, it was hard to keep up as a group. I ended up barely finishing all of the prompts, since it did take up a lot of time, but overall I think it was a fun project.

I don't see us doing it again this coming year, but maybe we'll revisit it another year in the future with some new prompts!

Check out our website here to see everyone else's!

2019 Recap

So it's that time of year where the year is ending, so I'm gonna reflect a bit on how this year went. Let's start with how it went in my art:

I started out by experimenting with inks and watercolors to try out some different traditional mediums. It was fun and I enjoyed the ink tests. I ended up doing a few illustrations of scenes from The Nays, but not a whole lot. I did my 47 Days of Positivity project again. I did Inktober, Huevember, and Digicember as usual. And then some sketches here and there.

Overall, things went pretty well, but something felt kind of static.

I feel like I wasn't really getting into my drawings a whole lot this year. I was just kind of drawing for the sake of drawing and posting, rather than for fun like I used to. I was looking at how many Eventures I wrote and it wasn't a lot for this year. I redid a bunch towards the beginning of the year, but once summer hit, it kinda went downhill.

At my job, summer is a crazy time and it's easy to feel overwhelmed and busy. I think that's why I would play video games or do something less involved when I was done with work or on weekends. I also visited a lot of friends in the fall and winter, which meant going out and having fun. While I love doing those things, I was noticing that I kind of neglected working on my story and drawing for fun during those times. And that left me feeling kind of unfulfilled in a way, even though I was having a lot of fun doing other things.

So overall this was a really weird year for art. I drew a lot and accomplished a lot of things, but it didn't really pay off and put me in a weird place, artistically. I have some plans that I'll talk about in my next 2020 post, but that's all for now!

And as a bonus, here's my 2010 recap to show the difference between the beginning and end of the decade.

Improvement Movement: Draw This Again

As part of the Improvement Movement project, I redrew an old drawing from 2010!

Here's the 2019 version.

And this was the 2010 version.

And this is a gif to showcase the process!

Banner Progression

I designed a new banner to use on some of my sites! My old one featuring The Nays needed a drastic update since it was old, so I decided to spend some time and draw a new one.

Here's the updated banner!

This was the original one I made back in 2012.

I re-drew my characters and remade it in 2014.

And again in 2016.

And then again, the new and improved 2018 version!

Onward to 2018!

Now it's 2018, which means a new beginning!

I'm going to start off by showing a summary of my art over the years.

(If this is too hard to read or see, check out the bigger version here)

2017 was kind of slow year artistically in comparison to previous years since I was so busy, and I anticipate that 2018 will be equally busy. So how am I planning to balance that?

It's actually something I'm trying to work out and think through. For right now though, I'm thinking that I need a break from "daily projects," since sometimes those end up draining my creativity in a weird way since they're more limited. I might end up trying to stick to more sketches and illustrations. I think it would be beneficial to have more variety in my work so it's not just set daily projects.

I know I get caught up in it every year, but this year I'm going to try and see how posting every other day works instead of posting every day (on blogger at least). That way I might be able to spend more time on things instead of worrying about what I need to create in order to make a post for the next day. That might help me out a bit more with experimenting.

I want to create more posts showcasing my progress rather than just showing what I've drawn over the past two days. I feel like that would set my blog apart from my other social media platforms, which is kind of what I want to do.

I also want to create more projects for fun instead of "for posting." For example, taking some time to just mess around in RPG Maker on a game that I'm not planning to release anywhere might be a fun usage of my time. And who knows, maybe something really awesome will come out of it and I'll actually polish it enough to post it some day.

I also want to start practicing fundamentals like anatomy and proportions again. I've been so busy that I haven't had much time to dedicate to it, but I've kind of noticed it in some of my art, so I want to get back into that habit.

Another thing I kind of want to get back into was something I started back in 2016. I want to do more world building and character development stuff. 2016 focused a lot on "the portfolio," but I kind of just want to do a bunch more sketches and concepts revolving around the world I've built and different costumes/changes that my characters go through. I've already started a bunch of documents to develop these things, but I think it would be fun to dive in and just draw some of the things I've written about.

Like what if I worked on illustrations/more detailed concepts on Sundays? Just an idea since those will be my most free days. But that might be a fun idea. Right now I'm basically just brainstorming, so no promises yet.

I do have some plans for a project that I'll be doing in February and March, but more details on that project will come once I start it and flesh it out a little more. That project is going to be very personal, too, so I'm not sure how much of it will actually be posted publicly.

Right now I have a lot of hypothetical things that I want to happen in 2018. It's weird and different because I'm used to very planned out goals and schedules, but I wonder if this kind of freedom and open plan will actually be more beneficial for me in a way. I'm going to try it out this year and then see how it goes. And I predict that as the year progresses I'm going to create an organized plan anyway, but starting out this way is an interesting change in pace that I'd like to try out.

So anyway, these are just some general thoughts and ideas. Now to start creating new stuff in 2018! Hopefully it'll be an even better year than 2017.

2017 Recap

It's that time of year: New Year's Eve! Which means I'll be reflecting and talking a bit about how 2017 went for me overall, as a person and an artist. This'll be one of my longer posts to kinda keep you updated on what's been going on.

Here is my artwork summary of 2017!

The year started out fairly busy with my curriculum work that lasted until May. In the meantime I was able to do some art for myself, including my Eventure Doodles project. I got through almost all of the Eventures that were numbered at the time.

Since then, I have been reworking my story a lot and adding in parts earlier on. I created a few documents to keep myself organized, including a document for sorting the Eventures into arcs. That helped me re-order some of the earlier ones and really hone in on which ones fit together best. And all-in-all, we finished 9 Eventures this year! That's a pretty good average and tied with 2012 and 2015. That's technically the third highest number of Eventures per year (since 2011 and 2016 were tied for second with 12). I'm impressed we did so many considering how busy this year has been.

So back in the spring, I had the opportunity to participate in two weeks of Spring Break Camp with iD Tech. I met some really great people there and had a lot of fun. Then fast-forwarding to June, I taught at iD Tech's Stanford location: the biggest camp they've got! I was a Lead Instructor, so I had a lot of responsibilities and roles. It was a crazy experience, but I'm glad I did it. I learned a lot and was able to set some new goals for myself based on the experience.

After the summer, I flew to Kentucky to hang out with my friend Jinny for a week. It was great to have this vacation after the busy summer. And then after that vacation, I went on vacation part two where I went to Las Vegas with a group of co-workers and friends from iD Tech. It was the first time I had gone since I was a baby, so it was a lot of fun to see. So much good food and company!

Then I finally got back into working on personal projects full-time when September came around. I worked on personal projects for a few months and was able to accomplish a lot. I also worked a lot on the game I've been working on with my friends for about a year or so now. I finished a lot of re-writing and proofreading that needed to be done. We're still not sure when we'll be ready to post new information about that, but I'll definitely be posting here when it's time for that. We're doing a lot of re-working to make sure that it's up to the quality level we hope to obtain. This is slowing down our progress a bit, but it'll be worth it in the end.

And as usual, I participated in Inktober, Huevember, and Digicember this year. Inktober was a weird experiment where I designed new characters not for my main story. It was fun at first, but I started to run out of ideas towards the end. Huevember was a mixture of Huevember and NaNoWriMo, so it was also a fun experiment. I started spending a lot of time on them though, so I wanted to try out sketching more often. And that's when Digicember happened where I decided to be a lot looser with my work and it was the most successful of the three.

In December, I started my job back up with iD Tech, writing curriculum. This time around I'm also writing the new GameMaker curriculum, so that's been fun working in so far. Since I only started a week before the holiday break, I haven't worked a whole lot yet, but I'm excited to continue working once we get back from the holiday break!

Overall 2017 was an interesting year. I think I did a lot better in my personal life, so that was a nice break from some things that happened in 2016. I'll talk about some plans for 2018 in my next post, but overall I'm hoping to squeeze in more time for personal projects on days that I'm working so I can keep on practicing. 2017 was probably my busiest year so far, so that's why I might've updated a bit less, but we'll see what 2018 brings!

See you in 2018!

The Nays Logo Improvements

So the other week I was looking through old art and realized just how far The Nays logo has come. All the way back from when it was called The Worlds. I'm finally happy with where it's ended up now (the one at the very bottom).

Draw This Again

The other day I rewrote one of my old Eventures (that hadn't been touched since high school), and I figured, while I was at it, I might as well redraw one of the old drawings from that Eventure! The original was drawn in 2009, while the current was drawn in 2017. What a difference 8 years can make!

2017 version

2009 version